Democrat Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez joins crowded Texas...

1of2Democrat Cristina Tzintzn Ramirez is the seventh Democrat to join a crowded primary race to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2020 election.Photo: Diana Ascarrunz / Courtesy

2of2Democrat Cristina Tzintzn Ramirez is the seventh Democrat to join a crowded primary race to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2020 election.Photo: Diana Ascarrunz / Courtesy

WASHINGTON — Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a longtime workers rights advocate who launched a nonprofit that champions Latino voters, announced Monday she's running for Senate — a move that's likely to shake up a crowded Democratic primary field that is still taking shape.

Tzintzún Ramirez, 37, plans to run as an unapologetic progressive, supporting Medicare for All, aggressive action on climate change and a “massive disinvestment” in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She has hired organizers from Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign and has drawn the support of some of his financial backers.

All of that will likely make her a target of incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn, who has already taken to branding several of the six other Democrats vying for the party’s nomination as Elizabeth Warren-style progressives.

“I want to make sure that Texas is actually a leader on the major issues,” Tzintzún Ramirez told the Chronicle.

“We have more to gain and more to lose than any other state,” she said, citing Texas’ highest-in-the-nation uninsured rate, its U.S.-leading carbon footprint and the fact that 1-in-3 Texas residents are immigrants or children of immigrants.

Left-leaning Democrats had in recent months worked to recruit Tzintzún Ramirez, who has a long track record of activism, but no political experience. For her campaign, she has drafted several workers from O’Rourke’s 2018 race against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz — including his former field director and deputy field director — as well as some proven fundraisers who see her as another dynamo who can generate the sort of energy O’Rourke did while reaching voters who have rarely shown up at the polls.

“My campaign and team is really bringing the best of the lessons learned from the Beto campaign, but also the hard grassroots work myself and others on our team have done in reaching often ignored voters — young voters, black and brown voters,” Tzintzún Ramirez said. “I have my feet very much planted on the ground here in Texas. I get to talk to people who most politicians ignore.”

Tzintzún Ramirez, a millennial who is the daughter of immigrants, said there would be “a lot of symbolism” in a contest pitting herself against Cornyn “in a state with such a heavy diverse population he has consistently ignored.”

Immigration will be a top issue. She told the Chronicle she wants “massive divestment from ICE and investment in [the Department of Labor] to enforce the rights of immigrant workers and to protect the rights of American workers.”

“They have refused to deal with immigration reform in a state where one in 10 workers is undocumented, where the economic boom in this state has literally been built on the backs of undocumented workers,” she said. “We have to acknowledge states like Texas — and our country — depend on immigrant workers.”

Cornyn, meanwhile, has amassed more than $9 million to fend off whichever Democrat he ends up facing next year. In fundraising emails, he has consistently attacked Democrats for “pushing their open-borders, high-taxes, lawless agenda on the American public.”

Tzintzún Ramirez spent more than a decade at the Workers Defense Project, a group she co-founded and turned into one of the state’s most effective advocates for workers and immigrants.

After the election of Donald Trump, she launched Jolt, a group that has spent the last three years focusing exclusively on mobilizing Latinos in Texas. The group claims it helped drive unprecedented voter registration and turnout in 2018 by doing things such as registering voters at quinceañeras and on college campuses. Tzintzún Ramirez said Jolt organizers talked to close to 40,000 voters in 2018, most of whom were young and new or infrequent Latino voters.Her work there drew national attention.

Eugene Sepulveda, a major Democratic fundraiser serving as her campaign treasurer calls her “unbelievable.”

“She is charismatic, she is smart, wildly articulate, data driven and just blows your socks off,” he said.

Sepulveda, who was a fundraiser for former President Barack Obama, said he’s introducedTzintzún Ramirez to “tons of people — including conservative people — who, everyone is blown away when they meet her.

Benjamin Wermund is the Houston Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. He previously covered federal education policy and national education issues at POLITICO, and before that covered higher education at the Chronicle and K-12 education at the Austin American-Statesman. He’s a Texas native and a diehard Spurs fan.